Being a professional in this industry can sometimes bring an unwarranted negative image. The perception of finance and investment banking professionals often attracts blame for issues such as the financial crash in 2008.

In order to overcome this stigma, professionals in the finance and investment banking industry should look towards increasing their personal brand and changing people’s mind through positivity.

I asked the personal-branding expert Talaya Waller what she recommends and finds of value for personal (i.e. professional) branding. Here is what she said: "As a newly published researcher, I’ve encouraged my colleagues to make sure they create an account and complete a profile on Google Scholar. You can connect with other researchers and see where your work has been cited. You can network with other scholars as well. In addition, every professor should think about having a professional landing page online outside of their university. They can use their site to publish their unpublished and published work, solicit other thought leaders in their field, and have a method of contact for researchers to ask them about their work."

When you focus on social media engagement, you are trying to increase the interactions that you are sharing with your followers. Yes, more likes (and shares) usually means more exposure. Yet, for most business professionals the purpose of their online presence strategy is to market themselves to a select target audience. This is an upgrade from a general audience simply “liking” what you are posting. Social media engagement allows you to build relationships through sharing content with select industry peers, clients, and/or constituents. From this point you can start to build meaningful, long-lasting professional relationships with those online connections.

When using social media we need to answer this question: “How can I use this to build relationships AND get measurable results in my professional life?" Below are tips on how to use social media engagement to network and build relationships to accomplish your professional goals.

We know the power of social media–or we should. It has started protest movements, given presidential candidates a jump-start and had people fired. So while social media–Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram and others–may be a boon for easing communication, working professionals (and those who want to be) need to remember that social media accounts are not completely private; tweets and other regretted posts can be screensaved and actually live forever.

On Monday, June 15th we had the pleasure of shooting business headshots for members of the Women’s Information Network (WIN). According to the WIN event coordinator, the event sold out in 30 minutes with 25 women registered for the speed photo-shoot and 50 on the wait-list.